I take your point, though I think when I wrote “more impressive”, the “to me” was implied. However, I posit that there’s one objective measure whereby the two feats can be compared: however much Joey Chestnut is pushing his physical limits in competitive eating, he’s only doing so for ten minutes. Courtney set her Western States record by finishing in 15:29:34. Put another way, that’s 929 minutes, or 92.9 times longer than Chestnut. I think that goes a long way to support the assertation that ultrarunning is more challenging than competitive eating.
I concede, though, that a hot dog-eating contest is more telegenic than a hundred-mile mountain race.
15 hour competitive eating contests could be held also. Lot’s of events test the limits of human ability in much less time than 10 minutes. There are much longer races than a 100 yard dash or 100 meter sprint, that get measured in seconds but sometimes short term exertion is important also. All the individual field events are brief, high jumps, long jumps, and pole vaults only take moments, as do hammer, javelin, and shot put events. There could be an eating decathlon that could cover consumption of a number of foods over different lengths of time. Reaching the limits of human physical ability is always impressive.
And yet, the goal in these contests is to minimize their duration, and typically, a shorter duration makes the feat more impressive rather than less. So I’m not sure duration is a great marker of impressiveness.
Yes, because that’s my point; the goal of the sport - to eat the most hot dogs in ten minutes, or to run 100+ miles in the least time - is irrelevant to this.My assertion is that, however physically demanding eating 83 hot dogs in ten minutes is, and I don’t deny that it is, I doubt I could eat that many in a whole day, nevertheless he’s only pushing himself for that ten minutes. Katie Schide pushed her limits for 22 hours last weekend, when she set the new women’s record at the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc. I don’t know if anyone’s ever measured the number of calories Chestnut burns doing an eating contest, but but it would be an interesting comparison to put it up to the number Jim Walmsley burns during a race.
To @TriPolar’s comment comparing the two sports is like comparing a marathon to a 100-meter dash, that’s a fair point. Again, though, you could judge by looking at the calories burned by Chestnut vs. those burned by Noah Lyles when he won the 100m last month in Paris.
I don’t find duration a convincing argument. What is the Olympic record for weightlifting? How long did that take? Every time I’ve seen footage of an Olympic weightlifter winning a medal, it takes less than thirty seconds for them to grab the weight, pick it up, lift it, and put it back on the ground.
Ultramarathoning isn’t impressive because it takes a long time. It’s impressive because its practitioners are pushing the limits of human physical performance so the very edge. Just like strongmen and swimmers and gymnasts and, yes, eaters.
I recognize that my posts in this thread sound like “It doesn’t interest me, therefore it’s stupid”, but that’s not what I’m trying to say at all; rather, I’m attempting to show why I find ultrarunning – or running a 3:43:13 mile, or clearing a 6.26 meter pole vault – more impressive, and requiring more athletic ability, than eating 82 hot dogs in ten minutes.
Saying that you find it more interesting and impressive is a totally valid opinion to have. In this particular case you sound like you’re trying to prove, using stuff like duration of the event or calories burned, to show that these sports are objectively more impressive than competitive eating.
Which is of course impossible. Nothing can be objectively more impressive than anything else since impressiveness is itself inherently subjective.
